Recordings.

South Pacific (Original Broadway cast album

Sony...

April 18, 1993|By Sid Smith.

South Pacific (Original Broadway cast album; Sony Broadway).

One of the oldest of the great musical LPs, this 1949 chestnut endures as one of the best. Re-released as part of the 50th-anniversary celebration of "Oklahoma!", "South Pacific" is arguably a better Rodgers and Hammerstein score, the sultry winds of Pacific wartime drifting their way through so much of this moody, hummable, orchestrally soaring achievement.

This is sublime schmaltz. Mary Martin was never better, and to hear her renditions of "A Wonderful Guy" et al. again is to rediscover both her smoothness and that magic bubble hidden somewhere inside her voice. For once, an opera great, Ezio Pinza, seemed made for Broadway, and this re-release sparkles with three extras from studio vaults: Martin doing two cuts from the show, "Loneliness of Evening" and "My Girl Back Home" (used in the movie version) and Pinza doing "Bali Ha'i," which he never sang on stage.